or individuals. For example, the integration of Chinese food or French linguistics into American culture both represent this concept. History of Bourdieu and reproduction theory The concept of cultural reproduction was first developed by French sociologist and cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu in the early 1970s. Initially, Bourdieu's work pertained to education in modern society, believing that the education system was used solely to 'reproduce' the culture of the dominant class in order for the elite to continue to hold and release power. Bourdieu's theories recognizably build upon the conjectures of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Norbert Elias, among others. Beginning to study socialisation and how dominant culture and certain norms and traditions affected many social relations, Bourdieu's ideas were especially similar to those of Louis Althusser's notion of Ideological State Apparatuses, which had emerged around the same time. Bourdieu's sociological work was dominated by an analysis of the mechanisms of reproduction of social hierarchies. In opposition to Marxist analyses, Bourdieu criticised the primacy given to the economic factors, and stressed that the capacity of social actors to actively impose and engage their cultural productions and symbolic systems plays an essential role in the reproduction of social structures of domination. Playing an essential part in Bourdieu's sociological analysis is what he called symbolic violence: the capacity to ensure that the predictability of the social order is ignored—or mis-recognised as natural—and thus to ensure the legitimacy of social structures. In regards to cultural reproduction, one of the main concepts of Bourdieu was introduced in Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction (1970), written with Jean-Claude Passeron, in which the writers primarily focus on the structural reproduction of disadvantages and inequalities that are caused by cultural reproduction. According to Bourdieu, inequalities are recycled through the education system and other social institutions. Bourdieu believed that the prosperous and affluent societies of the West were becoming the cultural capital. High social class, familiarity with bourgeois culture, and educational credentials determined one's life chances. It was biased towards those of higher social class and aided in conserving social hierarchies. This system concealed and neglected individual talent and academic meritocracy. Along with Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society, Bourdieu demonstrated most of his known theories in his book The Inheritors (1964). Both books established him as a progenitor of "reproduction theory." Bourdieu also pioneered many procedural frameworks